Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

12

HANGING BY A THREAD

Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear Basil.

—OSCAR WILDE, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

DESPITE ANGERED COUNCIL members, theologians retrenched for battle, and antiquarians still grumbling over Rudbeck’s audacious moves to protect his printer, the new challenge was not to come from the most likely camps. Nor was it even that someone was offended when the Swedish physician dared to place the halls of Hades in their homeland, or pulled the pagan temple of Atlantis out from the walls of a prominent church. The problem, actually, was worse.

This was a simple, nonpartisan objection that was inspired at first by largely intellectual motivations. Back in the 1650s, while Rudbeck was still busy avoiding his anatomy lectures and dabbling in his new botanical garden, a celebrated classical scholar named Johannes Schefferus had begun his own investigations into the early history of Uppsala.

A short man with a long nose, who reportedly always wore a silk cape, Schefferus was probably Sweden’s most prominent classical humanist. He had married the daughter of Professor Loccenius, the president of the College of Antiquities, and on the occasion of his wedding ceremony, he danced for the only time in his life. Like his father-in-law, Schefferus was another serious, talented German thinker who had come over to Uppsala University and found himself smitten by the glowing patriotism of his adopted country. Locking himself in his study overlooking the river, Schefferus devoted almost every waking hour to unhampered scholarship.

With this love of learning, Schefferus had tackled the early history of Uppsala, publishing his discoveries in a lavish work of scholarship, Upsalia (1666). The product of over a decade of study, Upsalia traced the history of the university town from its pagan origins through the conversion to Christianity and the flourishing of the modern diocese centered in the majestic cathedral. In this work, Schefferus advanced an argument that the famous temple of Old Uppsala had not actually been in Old Uppsala. It had stood instead, he claimed, right in the heart of the modern town of Uppsala, down from the cathedral and near the present Trinity Church.

In fact, by the time Schefferus was through with his study, Old Uppsala itself was not even in Old Uppsala—that, too, was located in the modern university town. Although this theory is now known to be incorrect, Schefferus’s revision was certainly still plausible in the seventeenth century. And with a forceful advocate in Professor Schefferus, this rival theory could potentially have much appeal in the learned world. It could also, undoubtedly, cause considerable trouble for Olof Rudbeck, making his work in progress, as he would later say, “not worth reading, much less printing.”

The first salvos in this controversy had been fired by Olaus Verelius when he published his edition of the Hervararsaga in 1672. While he was working on his scholarly notes for this Norse tale, Verelius found many shortcomings with Schefferus’s theory, which he thought relied too heavily on late evidence of questionable value. Indeed it was fairly easy for him to undermine the basis of Schefferus’s position.

Verelius also received help from Rudbeck, whose investigations of the Old Uppsala burial mounds satisfactorily showed the great antiquity of the Swedish civilization. Rudbeck’s new staff confirmed that there were no older burial mounds than those found at the traditional location. No fewer than 665 burial mounds dated back almost four thousand years, to 2100 B.C., years before the outbreak of the Trojan War and the brilliant flowering of classical civilization.

This very point made Schefferus’s work all the more indigestible. When placing the old temple and the town in modern Uppsala, Schefferus had also claimed that the famous pagan temple was not really all that old. He pointed to the historical sources, such as the Norse chronicler Snorri Sturluson, who claimed that the temple had not been founded until the reign of King Frei, that is, just before the birth of Christ. And if this temple dated back only to the first century, how could it have been, as Rudbeck was in the process of claiming, the lost golden temple of Atlantis? Besides, what would Schefferus’s claim, if proved, have to say about the reliability of Rudbeck’s archaeological dating methods, which had repeatedly confirmed a much greater antiquity?

Schefferus’s Upsalia, in other words, challenged the very basis of Rudbeck’s work in progress. Initially the dispute was conducted in the usual scholarly fashion of debate and discussion. Schefferus pointed to his sources, which were mainly medieval textual references to the Old Uppsala temple. Verelius was quick to answer with powerful counterarguments, complete with support from even older Norse manuscripts in De la Gardie’s collection, which Schefferus had not seen, and supplemented further by Rudbeck’s discoveries in the field. At this point, in the late spring of 1677, Schefferus opted for a different strategy. He asked the chancellor of Uppsala University, Count de la Gardie, to impose an act of censorship, strictly forbidding any further discussion of this issue.

This was an excellent time for Schefferus’s unexpected request. De la Gardie could not have been more distracted, given the war, his fears of his enemies’ plots in Stockholm, and his obvious unease as these same rivals were making themselves indispensable to the young king. In May 1677 the count’s reply reached Uppsala. Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie expressed his displeasure at the behavior of the dueling scholars Verelius and Schefferus. Then he stressed the importance, indeed the necessity, of putting a stop to this incessant quarreling. He felt so “tired and sorry” about the state of affairs at the academy, with the scholarly disputes so “inconveniently and unreasonably” feeding on each other. No longer would any printer be allowed to churn the presses to contribute to this rotten state. The count ordered an immediate ban on the printing of materials related to this dispute.

What must have particularly upset Rudbeck and Verelius was that immediately before making this appeal, Professor Schefferus had finished writing his own commentary on the controversy and then rushed it out of town to be printed secretly in Stockholm. Without following the customary procedures, Schefferus raced the work from the printer to the market at a “dizzying speed.”

The Epistola defensoria, a seventy-page pamphlet, did not actually add much new material. But that made little difference. Bringing together the older arguments into one place with a cogent, articulate punch, the Epistola was intended to be the last word before the prohibition was scheduled to go into effect—a ploy worthy of the intrigues found in the works of the Roman historians Schefferus so much loved reading. The man who was responsible for lecturing on the art of politics knew how to play the game when he wanted.

When the chancellor’s ban was announced in May 1677, Schefferus’s work had already been in circulation for about two weeks. Uppsala’s scholars responded to the news in a mixed fashion. Verelius burst out, “I have not written anything that I cannot defend, nor anything prohibited by the censor,” reaffirming the strength of his case, which he had built up with the help of the best historical evidence. The old Norse manuscripts that supported the traditional view were in fact much more genuine than the documents Schefferus relied upon, copies that were written down centuries after the sagas.

Referring also to the efforts he made to avoid offense, Verelius detailed how he had sent his arguments on the controversy to many friends for advance inspection. He asked each reader to mark an X next to anything that should be stricken from publication. From the royal censor to Professor Rudbeck, many had read the words and approved of his (uncustomarily) genteel approach, including Count de la Gardie, who now banned its printing. Even Professor Loccenius, Schefferus’s own father-in-law, had proofread the comments in advance. Verelius felt such bitter disappointment at Schefferus’s actions and the count’s prohibition that privately he swore he would never publish a scholarly work again.

As Verelius raved about the merits of his arguments, Professor of Medicine Hoffvenius responded like the Cartesian many suspected he was: Since this was a dispute about such tangible matters, why not make an official expedition to Old Uppsala and settle this once and for all?

The stakes in the matter were clear: the implications extended far beyond the debate about Old Uppsala. They struck at the heart of Rudbeck’s personal quest.

In a private letter to the count, written a few days after the prohibition was announced at Uppsala, Rudbeck put the importance of an expedition bluntly:

If this cannot be true, which still today stands in front of everyone’s eyes, then everything that I want to show in my work from our oldest poets and eddas, and the very oldest Greek, Latin, Egyptian, and Chaldean and Arabic writings about the size of the temple, its construction, its style of columns, its proximity to Lake Mälaren, the three springs, the mounds, the racetrack, etc., the exodus of the gods and kings from Sweden and the entire chronology will fall and not be worth reading, much less printing.

A trip to Old Uppsala would surely settle the matter to everyone’s satisfaction, indeed just as Professor Hoffvenius proposed.

But the other professors refused to participate in such an excursion. They did not wish to provoke Schefferus, a very respected figure in town, let alone blatantly contradict the letter and spirit of the chancellor’s decree. Undiscouraged, Rudbeck and his supporters decided to go ahead anyway. If the Uppsala professors on the council would not come, they would find other judges. And indeed they did. One May afternoon in 1677 they brought along a band of thirteen Germans—twelve army officers and a priest—who all had served in the Danish army and had been captured as prisoners of war.

Deemed neutral and impartial, these prisoners were released on the grounds around the Old Uppsala church and burial mounds. At the end of their explorations, they confirmed Rudbeck’s position: the foundation of the pagan temple was clearly seen in the existing church and hence, by deduction, this must have been part of the original Old Uppsala.

Even if few outside the most fanatical believers would accept the testimony of these handpicked German prisoners as independent or of decisive importance in the controversy, Rudbeck knew the value of such an expedition. Scholars were debating about words in texts, when the actual place stood there for examination. “No documents are more certain about the truth of a thing than the thing itself,” Rudbeck wrote to the count. The fact that he was deeply convinced that Schefferus was wrong and highly confident that he could prove it made the situation more frustrating.

While this quixotic outing to Old Uppsala was apparently having no significant effect in overturning the prohibition, Rudbeck emphasized the seriousness of the issue. “The life of our antiquities,” he said, “seems to hang by a thread.” But then something happened that has raised eyebrows ever since.

DURING THIS TIME OF confusion, probably late 1677 and definitely by early 1678, a curious document turned up in Uppsala. This was a loose manuscript, supposedly a summary of an older lost chronicle written by a thirteenth-century bishop of Västerås. Bishop Karl’s Chronicle, as the document came to be known, had much to say about the controversy.

According to this newly discovered chronicle, the construction of Sweden’s first cathedral had begun in the year 1138, and its bishop, Sverker the Elder, had chosen the site of Old Uppsala. Additionally, this document confirmed that the builders had used the ruins of the old pagan temple, which another ruler, Yggemund, had destroyed.

What a dramatic find—and it simply could not have come to light at a better time. Here, all of a sudden, was an old authority, a bishop no less, who seemed almost miraculously to confirm Rudbeck’s basic assumption about the location of Old Uppsala. Curiously, too, this document was found in a suspicious place: it had been inserted in the pages of an old medieval herbal treatise shelved in Olof Rudbeck’s own library.

No wonder questions have been raised about the authenticity of the so-called Bishop Karl’s Chronicle. Could Rudbeck and Verelius really have enjoyed the good fortune of stumbling on such valuable evidence in this time of need? For many, it was simply too convenient. Schefferus, for one, smelled a rat, and cried forgery.

Why, after all, did the bishop of Västerås spend so much time writing about Uppsala, a town outside his administration? Who could help but notice that this so-called thirteenth-century account managed to address just about every concern of the current debate in 1677—and displayed little interest in matters beyond this controversy? Other oddities, too, arose upon inspection of this document. Bishop Karl showed an unusual preference for some seventeenth-century terms, as opposed to the words often favored by medieval chroniclers. Most glaringly, the ink on the old manuscript seemed suspiciously modern.

All these questions were buzzing in the late spring of 1678 when Olaus Verelius decided to disregard the ban and publish the discovery. Verelius’s annotated excerpts of Bishop Karl’s Chronicle, Annotationes ex scriptis Karoli episcopi Arosiensis excerptae (Bishop Karl’s Annotations), reignited the old debate, unequivocally heralding this document as confirmation of the location of the pagan temple and town in Old Uppsala.

Schefferus was enraged. He was convinced that the entire manuscript was a forgery, “a most foul-ugly fraud” about to be imposed on the learned world (turpissimam fraudem et imposturam), and the biggest question on his mind was who had done it. The immediate suspect was of course Olaus Verelius. He had been utterly disappointed in the way Schefferus had managed to stifle discussion, and he was not exactly the person to sit idly by, allowing his grievance to fester. Indeed he had taken Schefferus’s manipulation personally, a fact that had not helped his already strained relationship with his former friend.

As Schefferus knew all too well, recent problems between the two scholars were still fresh in Verelius’s mind. Just as Rudbeck no longer felt welcome in the council chamber, Verelius had been experiencing his own ostracism from the College of Antiquities. Bitterly he had complained that several members of this body acted like “sworn enemies,” contriving to remove him from the scene. They held meetings, he charged, without bothering to invite him or even to notify him of the date, time, and location. He also felt that Schefferus and his fellow antiquarians made sure that he did not receive his promised salary. For his work as Professor of the Fatherland’s Antiquities, Verelius had been paid only two times in the last fifteen years.

From the college’s perspective, it was all a misunderstanding. The withholding of his salary was unfortunately true, but that was not an isolated case, and reflected only the overall financial problems that the college faced. Verelius, they said, was the one who showed no interest in the meetings. He would not take time to come into the university to check on the society’s events, and when he happened to be in town, he always seemed too preoccupied to attend the gatherings. Accusations flew from both sides of this heated dispute. Whatever the merits of his complaints, most certainly exaggerated, one thing was clear: Verelius felt hostility and a sense of persecution, which at times seemed to run on parallel lines with Rudbeck’s own impressions, drawing the two even closer together.

So, given how much these resentments were breaking apart the former friends in the College of Antiquities, Schefferus could only wonder if Verelius had orchestrated this strange episode of Bishop Karl’s Chronicle. He certainly had a motive. The printing of the old manuscript would promote his own work, settle the score over past animosities, and help his friend Rudbeck, whose own theory about Old Uppsala was threatening to come apart.

As the controversy simmered during the spring and summer of 1678, with the publication of Bishop Karl’s Annotations being eagerly read and Schefferus’s suspicions heard, Verelius felt compelled to defend himself. In a private letter to Count de la Gardie, he explained his actions. Schefferus was, in his opinion, trying unceremoniously to implicate him in a scandal of which he claimed complete innocence. Bishop Karl’s notes were not based on a spurious manuscript, he stated firmly. The document was genuine, and he wanted an official inquiry into the matter, with a jury staffed by members of the Royal Chancellery. All of the wild claims about an unadulterated fabrication were simply the product of “Schefferus’s delirium.”

A more likely culprit might be Olof Rudbeck himself. Would he not have more to gain than Verelius, who could, if he were exposed, forever be remembered for having edited and commented on a forged script? Rudbeck also had quite an authoritarian streak, and often found it difficult to control himself when he felt challenged or provoked. Given the articulate doubts of Sweden’s most esteemed humanist, it is not difficult to imagine Rudbeck becoming defensive with an almost explosive zeal. So much money, so much time, so much energy had already been committed, and Rudbeck felt that he was on the brink of finding that essential, irrefutable piece of evidence which would establish without doubt the truth of his lost world.

Besides, Rudbeck was famous for finding, or creating, loopholes and ways out of the worst predicaments. Here was a document that was not specifically forbidden by the chancellor’s prohibition. It could help him respond to Schefferus’s errors, indeed dangerous errors that threatened to keep knowledge of Old Uppsala, or Atlantis, out of public knowledge.

Stacks and stacks of halfway printed books littering the printer’s shop were not to be in vain. Nor was Rudbeck’s rash abandonment of university affairs, or his hasty, somewhat impulsive plunge into the complex study of the past. Rudbeck was driven to bolder, more audacious acts of desperation. Otherwise his Atlantica might come crashing down, indeed even before a single copy had been finished.

But, for some reason, no one has ever seriously accused Rudbeck of forging this document. Such a claim would imply many things that are hard to establish, especially the difficulty of imagining Rudbeck using his friend Verelius in this manner. Given the lack of supporting evidence, not to mention the fact that the original Bishop Karl’s Annotations is not known to have survived, it would be harsh to lay the blame squarely at Rudbeck’s feet.

Indeed, before his death in 1679, Schefferus would absolve Rudbeck of any possible guilt in the matter, and Verelius would go to his grave passionately affirming his own innocence. It is actually possible that both Rudbeck and Verelius were innocent. There was another man who was increasingly seen at Rudbeck’s side, his good friend Carl Lundius, an ambitious thirty-nine-year-old scholar who had married Vendela’s sister Gertrude. Lundius is overwhelmingly associated with a number of questionable documents. At this time, however, his reputation was impeccable.

Pursuing his lifelong goal of becoming a lawyer like his father, Carl Lundius was a professor of law quickly rising in esteem. He excelled in jurisprudence, Swedish law, Roman law, and influential natural-law doctrines of the day. Previously he had shown his legal finesse as an energetic member of the Witchcraft Commission for the northern province of Hälsingland. Historians are fond of telling the story of the time when Lundius came home after a long day at the witch trials and found, he claimed, an uninvited guest in his chamber: the Prince of Darkness himself.

Lundius was every bit as reckless as Rudbeck, often accompanying him on explorations of the supposed Atlantis. He was known in fact to have been present during one of those crucial visits to Old Uppsala during the tense period of May 1677 immediately after the chancellor’s prohibition. Looking at the works Lundius would publish over the next thirty years, one might conclude that he was even “more Rudbeckian” than the author of the Atlantica himself. Given his close relationship with the Rudbecks, he could also conceivably have smuggled this document into a place in the library where Rudbeck was bound to look.

Yet tracing this document back to Lundius is no simple matter. In fact, after a long time of assuming that this was an unabashed forgery, or some combination of fraud, faith, and a willingness to be deluded, some scholars have concluded that Bishop Karl’s Chronicle was probably, after all, a genuine document. According to the Swedish historian of science Sten Lindroth, the bulk of the evidence actually weighs in favor of its authenticity. Other solid, meticulous studies, though, have favored Schefferus’s conviction that it was a forgery.

At any rate, in this messy, complex scenario, with the question of forgery still very much in the air, the irony is that Rudbeck, Verelius, Lundius, and their supporters were actually correct about the main point in the debate. Old Uppsala was certainly situated where they thought, and where they also believed they had seen Atlantis. Given archaeological work done in the twentieth century, Rudbeck was probably also right about the site of the old pagan temple underneath the historic Christian church. The archaeologist Sune Lindqvist found traces of the foundation on the precise spot where Rudbeck envisioned it.

As for Schefferus, who was undoubtedly much more knowledgeable, experienced, and talented as a classical humanist scholar, he had relied too heavily on the authority of late sources, mostly fifteenth-century accounts that were written centuries after the flourishing of the pagan temple. It is quite odd to see this critical scholar misled by the sources. One historian put it more sharply: “That a man with Schefferus’s good head and historical education did not realize the weakness in such evidence, is undeniably peculiar.” Schefferus could hardly have avoided “realizing that this information about the pagan temple was completely worthless.” Such a strongly defensive posture was perhaps explained by a “not uncommon unwillingness to abandon an opinion.”

The same thing should also be said about Olof Rudbeck. Abrasive, relentless, and fanatical as he was in pursuing his quest, the strains of the crushing debts and the desperate attempts to pay them had made him even less willing to compromise.

Within a year after the publication of Bishop Karl Annotations, which were now, ironically, protected by the prohibition, some high-placed antiquarians were writing long letters attempting to persuade the count to overturn his decision. Schefferus’s close friend, the antiquarian scholar Johan Hadorph, wrote an impassioned appeal for loosing the ban. Arguing and pleading, they were desperate to slay the monster that they had gladly helped create.